New Jersey History Day 2025: Geographical Resources, Maps and Atlases

The Atlas of Historical County Boundaries is a powerful historical research and reference tool in electronic form. It presents in maps and text complete data about the creation and all subsequent changes (dated to the day) in the size, shape, and location of every county in the fifty United States and the District of Columbia. It also includes non-county areas, unsuccessful authorizations for new counties, changes in county names and organization, and the temporary attachments of non-county areas and unorganized counties to fully functioning counties. The principal sources for these data are the most authoritative available: the session laws of the colonies, territories, and states that created and changed the counties.

The David Rumsey Map Collection contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children's, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from about 1550 to the present. Digitization of the collection began in 1996 and there are now over 100,000 items online, with new additions added regularly. The site is free and open to the public. Here viewers have access not only to high resolution images of maps that are extensively cataloged, but also to a variety of tools that allow to users to compare, analyze, and view items in new and experimental ways.

A portal to 27 thematic collections of digitized maps from the Library of Congress covering a wide variety of places, time periods, and topics. Thousands of digitized maps are available for use in history projects.

The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides easy access to summary tables and time series of population, housing, agriculture, and economic data, along with GIS-compatible boundary files, for years from 1790 through the present and for all levels of U.S. census geography, including states, counties, tracts, and blocks. A free personal account is required to download data. Your school can request a license for free GIS software from ESRI - see this page for details.

A powerful search engine for locating historical maps online. Very useful when searching for maps of a specific place from a specific time.

Over 11,000 digitized historical maps from countries around the world are available for online viewing in the historical section of the Perry-Castandeda Map Collection of the University of Texas at Austin. The Americas, Australia and the Pacific, Asia, Europe and The Middle East are all represented on this extensive site, including individual collections such as pre-1945 Topographic Maps of the United States. Most maps are in the public domain, with those under copyright clearly marked as such.

The Sanborn Map Company is the oldest mapping company in the United States. Founded in 1866, the company created detailed building maps of cities and towns all across the country, primarily for use by insurance companies. These maps also have been used extensively by local government agencies for over a century in conducting their daily operations efficiently. Approximately 12,000 American cities and towns are chronicled in the company's collection of over one million maps. This page contains a selection of the maps covering Paterson, N.J. (including North Paterson and West Paterson Borough), from 1887 to 1923. By examining the first or index sheet of a series, the user can identify the number of the sheet that covers a particular street or site in Paterson. Maps from several other New Jersey cities have also been digitized - see this directory for details.

UNdata is a web-based data service for the global user community. It brings international statistical databases within easy reach of users through a single-entry point. Users can search and download a variety of statistical resources compiled by the United Nations (UN) statistical system and other international agencies. The numerous databases or tables collectively known as "datamarts" contain over 60 million data points and cover a wide range of statistical themes including agriculture, crime, communication, development assistance, education, energy, environment, finance, gender, health, labour market, manufacturing, national accounts, population and migration, science and technology, tourism, transport and trade.

Voting America: United States Politics, 1840-2008, examines presidential elections in the United States, taking nearly full advantage of the strengths of the digital medium. Using a variety of cinematic and interactive maps, Voting America attempts to uncover trends in voting and politics with visualizations of election data. While including the state level results, Voting America looks beyond the Electoral College, even arguing that a state view can give a misleading impression of only red states and blue states. However, this project does not simply provide scripted analysis. Interactive features allow and encourage further exploration of the election data.